The Tempest and The Winter's Tale: Two Great Plays From Shakespeare's Final Period

Aims of the course

• To introduce learners to critical study of Shakespeare’s late plays. 
• To equip learners with the background knowledge and critical tools needed for reading The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale with greater understanding and appreciation.
• To enable learners to assess the merits of some established critical views of the plays, and to engage critically with modern productions on stage or film.

Course content overview

Our main focus in this course will be Shakespeare’s final masterpiece, The Tempest, a play which richly rewards detailed exploration. We will read it alongside another extraordinary late play, The Winter’s Tale, to discover what these fascinating works from Shakespeare’s innovative final period have in common, as well as what is strikingly individual about each. We will give attention along the way to their distinctive and self-conscious approaches to dramatic spectacle and storytelling; their endlessly thought-provoking exploration of political, moral and religious, and psychological themes; the rich poetic and dramatic means by which they conjure their special atmosphere of ‘wonder’; and more. All aboard for a journey to the ‘brave new world’ of Shakespeare’s final period!

Target audience

This course is for anyone who is interested in reading or watching Shakespeare with greater understanding, and anyone wanting to establish a basis for further study of Shakespeare's late plays.

Welcome week (Week 0)

Purpose:

• personal introductions
• introducing the course
• useful reading
• personal objectives

Learning outcomes:

By studying this week, the students should have: 

• become familiar with navigating around the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and from VLE to links and back
• test your ability to access files and the web conferencing software and sort out any problems with the help of the Technology Enhanced Learning team
• learn how to look for, assess and reference internet resources
• contribute to a discussion forum to introduce yourself to other students and discuss why you are interested in the course and what you hope to get out of your studies 

Teaching Week 1 - Romance and Tragicomedy (The Winter's Tale, Acts 1-3)

The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, along with two other late plays, Pericles and Cymbeline, are commonly regarded as a group unto themselves, notably different in dramatic shape, tone, and even poetic style from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, tragedies, and history plays.  We will start by considering the distinctive qualities of these late plays, and why the terms ‘romance’ and/or ‘tragi-comedy’ are often used to describe them. We will then home in on The Winter’s Tale, a daringly experimental play which is conspicuously divided into two radically different halves, the first tragic and the second comic, with a ‘wide gap’ of sixteen years between the two parts of the story.  We will ask what extraordinary thing Shakespeare was trying to do in constructing a play like this, and whether he manages to make a dramatic success of it; and with those larger questions still in mind, we will conclude the week’s work by taking a deep dive together into the play’s tragically-structured first half (Acts One to Three).

Learning outcomes

• learned about the distinctive qualities of Shakespeare’s late plays and understood why they are often described as ‘romances’ or ‘tragicomedies’
• seen how The Winter’s Tale exemplifies the qualities of Shakespeare’s late period, as well as grasped the distinctive features which make it unique within that group
• discussed specific passages and themes in The Winter’s Tale, Acts 1 to 3, in order to explore the play in more detail and gain a deeper understanding of it.

Teaching Week 2 - Stagecraft and Storytelling (The Tempest, Act 1)

This week we turn to The Tempest, a play that resembles The Winter’s Tale in many ways, not least in its conspicuous interest in redirecting a potentially tragic story towards a happy ending, after a gap of many years.  But in this case a fundamentally different approach is taken to staging the story, with the play adhering to the Aristotelian ‘unity of time’ by showing us only the events of the decisive final day, whereas the earlier events which set the plot in motion are narrated to us in retrospect by the play’s characters themselves.  We will ask what difference this approach to telling the tale makes — and in particular, we will focus on Act One of The Tempest, which consists in large part in its characters remembering and relating past events, to see how Shakespeare depicts the meaning of the past as open to doubt and dispute, and thus radically complicates the moral significance of the whole story.  Are there clear-cut heroes and villains here, as the protagonist Prospero would like everyone to believe, or is something more nuanced going on?

We will also attend closely to the meta-theatrical tour de force of The Tempest’s opening scene, which first asks us to imagine that we are watching a shipwreck… only for it to be revealed that what we have ‘really’ seen staged was merely the magical and theatrical illusion of a shipwreck. By these extraordinary means the play introduces a number of key ideas which we will explore further in later weeks, among them the suggestive resemblance of Prospero’s magical ‘art’ to Shakespeare’s own art of stagecraft, and the play’s tendency to show any given situation from two radically different perspectives — not least showing how what seems at first glance ‘natural’ (e.g. a storm, or a king’s authority) may turn out to be a questionable construction of human ‘art’.

Learning outcomes 

• understood the unique dramaturgical features of The Tempest, in particular its adherence to the classical dramatic ‘unities’, which make it distinctive among the late plays
• looked in detail at the role of storytelling in the play, both as a way of informing the audience about events prior to the start of the dramatic action, and as a way in which characters interpret the past and contest its significance
• considered the implications of the play’s meta-theatrical exploration of the power of drama to make fictions seem compellingly real.

Teaching Week 3 - Politics and Points of View (The Tempest, Acts 2-3)

The structure of The Tempest in its middle section (Acts 2 and 3) is in one sense typical of Shakespeare’s mature dramatic artistry, in that the plot moves forward in parallel strands, the scenes alternating among distinct groups of characters and thereby showcasing sharp contrasts in social strata (high vs low), linguistic registers (verse vs prose), and types of action (from political intrigue to comic buffoonery to romantic love).  But in this play the separation of characters into groups, and the storylines that take shape for each group, are all being secretly orchestrated by a single controlling character, Prospero, who acts in this sense as a kind of surrogate dramatist within the play.  Hence events which, to the characters involved, seem to drift anarchically, and/or to afford them freedom to assume power over their own lives, from another point of view are seen as tightly controlled and directed towards a single clear end whose strands will be masterfully pulled together at the story’s conclusion.  Thus the play opens up an extraordinarily rich set of perspectives on its dramatic situations, and in particular on its characters’ political situations.  On the one hand we watch as characters thrown together on a bare island which invites thoughts of an egalitarian utopia, nonetheless spontaneously create a new political hierarchy, which allocates labour and resources, assigns rewards and punishments, and even invents a kind of religion; but on the other hand we see the same elements of power (control of labour and resources, reward and punishment, and religious discourses) exploited by Prospero to control the whole action from behind the scenes.  Our main business this week will be to explore this multifaceted unfolding of The Tempest’s political themes, to see why this has been found over the centuries to be one of Shakespeare’s most politically resonant and controversial plays.

Learning outcomes 

• looked closely at the dramatical organization of The Tempest into scenes featuring distinct sets of characters but sharing common themes and being guided towards a single end
• examined in detail the play’s unfolding of its political themes, with particular attention to issues of political authority and rebellion, freedom and anarchy, colonialism and slavery, and the idea that knowledge is power

Teaching Week 4 - Nature and Art (The Tempest, Act 4, and The Winter's Tale Act 4)

Both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale conspicuously shift gears in Act Four, all but suspending the story’s forward motion to present to us a vision of natural abundance and pastoral harmony in which romantic love can thrive; but in both cases this charming vision is disrupted by the end of the act, dropping the characters suddenly back into a world of unresolved strife and the pressures of time from which they (and we) had briefly seemed to have been released.  But while in The Winter’s Tale the idyllic pastoral vision is presented as if it were a spontaneous effusion of ‘great creating Nature’, in The Tempest it is depicted as a deliberately crafted product of ‘art’:  what difference does this make?  And meanwhile both plays explicitly raise wider questions about the respective roles of nature and art, not least in the formation of human character.  Is it birth or culture that ultimately determines the sort of people we are? More specifically, are some people born naturally noble and good, and others naturally base or wicked, or is the whole idea of noble birth a dubious cultural construct?  And meanwhile, can we really be improved by education and/or the elevating experience of poetry — or are we more intractable beings, ‘on whose nature / Nurture can never stick?’

Learning outcomes 

• identified the generic elements in the plays’ fourth-act interludes, and considered what functions these conspicuous set-pieces have within the plays’ larger dramatic designs
• compared the respective ways in which the two plays explore the relationship between nature and art, above all in the formation of human character
• explored how The Tempest in particular reflects meta-theatrically on the topical question of what power the art of drama may have not only to represent the world but to change it, and on whether that power can be made to serve specific moral or political agendas

Teaching Week 5 - Theatricality, Magic, and Wonder (The Tempest, Act 5, and The Winter's Tale, Act 5)

In the justly celebrated final acts of both these plays, an extraordinary kind of theatrical magic is performed which seems capable not only of bringing those who were thought to be dead back to life, but of redeeming tragic experience and of bringing new hope to the world.  Yet even amid these all-but-miraculous scenes of wonder, a double perspective prevails, as we are reminded that what seems like magic may actually be theatrical manipulation; and in The Tempest in particular, we are also reminded that what seems, at least to a hopeful new generation, to be a ‘brave new world’ in which a new start can be made, from another point of view is still the same old world as ever, rife with its irreconcilable discontents and its time-honoured injustices.  We will look closely together at the complexities of these rich concluding scenes, and reflect from this final vantage point on the two plays that we have studied.

Learning outcomes 

• understood the way the endings of these plays self-consciously participate in the comic and romance conventions of good fortune, poetic justice, and a world renewed
• investigated the tour de force ways in which both plays stage self-consciously theatrical scenes of wonder as the means by which the world is felt to be renewed
• considered the complex perspectives that the plays give us on their own endings, and asked, what relation are these elaborate fictions to be thought of as having to real life?

Week 6 - what next?

• assessment of student learning
• assessment of student satisfaction
• encouragement of further study
   

This course is open to everyone, and you don’t need any previous knowledge or experience of the subject to attend.  

Our short courses are designed especially for adult learners who want to advance their personal or professional development. They are taught by tutors who are expert in both their subjects and in teaching students of all ages and experiences. 

Please note that all teaching is in English. You should have near-native command of the English language to get the maximum benefit from the course. 

Each week of an online course is roughly equivalent to 2-3 hours of classroom time. On top of this, participants should expect to spend roughly 2-3 hours of self-study time, for example, reading materials, although this will vary from person to person. 

While they have a specific start and end date and will follow a weekly schedule (for example, week 1 will cover topic A, week 2 will cover topic B), our tutor-led online courses are designed to be flexible and as such would normally not require participants to be online for a specific day of the week or time of the day (although some tutors may try to schedule times where participants can be online together for web seminars, which will be recorded so that those who are unable to be online at certain times are able to access material). 

Unless otherwise stated, all course material will be posted on the VLE so that they can be accessed at any time throughout the duration of the course and interaction with your tutor and fellow participants will take place through a variety of different ways which will allow for both synchronous and asynchronous learning (using discussion boards etc).

Fees 

The course fee includes access to the course on our VLE, personal feedback on your work from an expert tutor, a certificate of participation (if you complete work and take part in discussions), and access to the class resources for two years after your course finishes. 

Concessions 

For more information, please see our concessions information page. 

Alison Fordham Bursary

University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education is proud to offer the Alison Fordham bursary, which is awarded to students who wish to study on one of our short online courses via our VLE, reducing the fee paid by 50%. The bursary is limited to a single award for each set of online courses. 

Application criteria:  

• applicants should set out their personal learning motivations since priority will be given to those who are returning to learning after an extended break, or have not previously engaged with fully online learning, or are seeking to use the online short course as a bridge towards undergraduate award-bearing study
• applicants who can demonstrate financial need 

For more information, please see our bursaries information page. 

A certificate of participation and a digital credential will be awarded to those who contribute constructively to weekly discussions, exercises and assignments for the duration of the course.